When I first started playing pinball in '77, most of the tables were EMs and Gottlieb seemed to occupy the majority of our local game room, though Bally took a close 2nd place. Some of my first favorite tables were Royal Flush, Target Alpha and Pioneer from Gottlieb, Capt Fantastic, Aladdin's Castle & Old Chicago from Bally.
But then the first SS tables by Bally started to arrive, first with Eight Ball, and then this classic table, Mata Hari.
Mata Hari was a very popular table, selling over 16,000 units. It seemed there was one everywhere I went, including the Just Fun Arcade at the Mountain Farms Mall in Hadley, MA.
But my most favorite place to play it was at the Student Life Center at Umass in Amherst, MA. In walking through the halls of that building back in that day, it seemed that every little nook and cranny were like little mini-arcades. The Mata Hari table there, sitting next to Atari's Middle Earth, was somehow changed. The gameplay was faster, much more responsive. It seemed to me that the angle of the table was steeper. But the flippers and bumpers were also more responsive. It was hard to keep the ball in play at first. It seemed like the game kept shoving the ball down my throat. But I soon got used to the heightened physics this table seemed to have and started mastering it quite well. I got to where I could go for a couple hours on 1 quarter.
Eight Ball / IPD No. 760 / January 17, 1977 / 4 Players
by Kurt Herman
